Feinstein by Dylan.
In 2006 he explained to me the photograph of a pill bottle, eventually published in the same Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript. “When Marilyn Monroe died, (Barry’d previously shot stills of her and Gable on the set of The Misfits) I was sent over to her place by Magnum [an image-bank]. The place was crawling with photographers. I nodded to the one cop I knew in California. He waved me over and said: ‘You’ve got 30 seconds to shoot whatever you want through the window.’ I got off half a roll including this picture of the sleeping pills beside her bed…to my knowledge it’s the only such picture that exists.” And yet we’d never know these images had they not been admired by a young troubadour whose poems scratched alongside the B&W pics were recently discovered in an attic. His name? Bob Dylan.
Barry acknowledges his career as a photographer of musicians began in September of 1963, when, as a favor, he retrieved his friend Albert Grossman’s 1951 Silver Dawn Rolls Royce from a Denver dealership. Grossman’s newest client, the fresh-faced, waif-like kid who’d belied Jewish origin with the name of a Welsh poet, tagged along for company. [Dylan was taking a break between sessions which would result in The Times They Are A-Changin’.] On the long drive back to New York they crashed a revival meeting held in a huge balloon-like tent, parked outside a saloon where Dylan had been a piano player (he was fired), and raced a freight train through the night across the Nebraska plains, laughing and honking, honking and laughing at the locomotive which tooted back before finally veering north. “Two hours went by like five minutes,” Barry told me in ‘99, “Our cheeks ached from smiling so hard.” Continuing across I-80 into Nebraska, “Masters of War” came on a late-night college radio station, followed by “Don’t Think Twice.” Barry pulled over and Bob listened for a first time to his songs played over the radio. Pushing on to I-76, driving through Amish Country, the Rolls weaved around the horse and buggies of Lancaster County. Then, on the last stretch, coming up the New Jersey Turnpike in early dawn light, Barry glanced over at his silent companion and realized he had just driven across America with a genius. “It wasn’t anything he said or did, I just…suddenly…knew. Yeah, before I picked up the camera, I became Bob’s friend. Shortly after I shot the cover for The Times They Are A-Changin’ in a ten minute session [an image which has been called one of the 10 most important photographs in rock]…and things started to move. When people ask me how I shot this or that picture of Dylan or Harrison or Joplin, the answer is: ‘by not taking it [laugh]…at least not for a while.’”
“Getting it right was no big deal for Barry,” remembers Stewart Levine, the break-every-rule producer who met Feinstein in ‘64. “He had plenty of time for other guys who could get it right — and they were few. And very little time for the rest — and they were many.”
To the Editor: I would like to thank Tad Wise for his beautiful tribute to one of my oldest and dearest friends, Barry Feinstein. I speak not only for myself but for the many others who also loved and cared for the colorful, bigger than life character who made our worlds so much more interesting — our Barry. Thank you, Tad. There were obits in the NYTimes, The LATimes, the UKGuardian and many other publications but it was yours and yours alone that touched the heart.